With the 2024 presidential election just weeks away, pundits are once again awaiting the possibility of an October surprise. Described by Merriam-Webster as a “revelation disclosed in the month prior to an election, often orchestrated in the hopes of dramatically influencing the result,” October surprises in the final days of an election cycle can drop bombshells on a candidate’s hopes — or not move the needle at all.
1920: Racial questions about Warren G. Harding
In the weeks leading up to the 1920 election, rumors began circulating that Republican candidate Warren G. Harding was African American, hoping to tap into the racist sensitivities of the era. The rumor started to brew nationally “when a racist professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio, William E. Chancellor, declared presidential candidate Harding unfit to be president because of his African heritage,” said the law website Justia.
These rumors were the “1920 version of the modern ‘birther’ conspiracy theory,” said Politico. However, the rumors — which have been proven to be untrue — did not stop Harding from winning the White House.
1980: The Iran hostage crisis
This October surprise concerned allegations that Republicans met with Middle Eastern leaders to “urge them to tell Iran to keep the U.S. hostages in Tehran until after the election that pitted GOP candidate Ronald Reagan against then-President Jimmy Carter,” said The Intercept.
There is “powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did — as has been alleged for decades — strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released,” said The Intercept. The hostages were kept through the end of the year, and Carter ended up losing the election in a landslide.
2000: George W. Bush’s DUI
Then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush admitted days before the 2000 election that he was “arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in Maine” in 1976, said The Washington Post. His “decision not to volunteer the information early in his campaign represented a calculated political risk by a presidential candidate.”
There were initial reports of the DUI before Bush’s admission, and he said “repeatedly that he had suspicions why this report had come out somehow ‘four or five days before an election,'” said The New York Times. The election was one of the closest in American history, and Bush was declared the winner after the Supreme Court interjected.
2012: Mitt Romney’s ‘47%’ video
One month prior to the 2012 election, a secretly recorded video of GOP candidate Mitt Romney emerged in which he says 47% of Americans are “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims,” adding that his “job is not to worry about those people.”
As Democrats were “striving to define Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat,” Romney himself provided “hard-and-fast evidence, in his own words, of a demeaning attitude toward nearly half the country,” said Mother Jones. The video “did shake up the race and place Romney on the defensive,” and he ended up losing to incumbent President Barack Obama.
2016: Access Hollywood tape
Exactly one month before the 2016 election, a 2005 tape emerged of then-candidate Donald Trump claiming that “when you are a star, they let you do” anything to women, adding that you can “grab them by the pussy.” Trump would later describe the video as “locker room talk.”
The tape caused a “crisis within the Trump campaign and pandemonium across the Republican Party,” said The New York Times. Though the tape did not stop Trump from winning the 2016 election, it became a topic of conversation again during his defamation trial with E. Jean Carroll, as prosecutors “mentioned the tape at various stages” his criminal trial.